August, 2006 News (continued)
Nebraska professor developing test strips to detect date-rape drugs
Associated Press
10 Aug 2006 12:00 am
An assistant professor of chemistry is developing a tiny testing kit that women can carry in their purses and use to quickly detect date-rape drugs.
Andrea Holmes, who teaches at Doane College in Crete, said "this seemed to be a really, really relevant topic."
"So many women on college campuses are being affected by this," said Holmes.
Date-rape drugs -- or "roofies" -- such as Rohypnol are secreted into a person's drink. The drug incapacitates the person and causes memory loss. Men and women who have been raped while under its influence can regain their senses with no memory of the assault.
Community education meeting planned
10 Aug 2006 12:00 am
Montana Project to End Violence Against Women with Disabilities will sponsor a free community education meeting from noon to 1:30 p.m. Aug. 31 at Bozeman Public Library, 220 E. Lamme.
The gathering hopes to address the disproportionate amount of domestic, sexual, peer and caregiver violence perpetrated against women with disabilities, mental illnesses and chronic health problems in Montana.
According to the Montana Board of Crime Control, more than 33 percent of the reported victims of domestic and sexual violence in the state have some type of disability.
Fighting Cyber Crime
Jodi Schwan
10 Aug 2006 12:00 am
About one in three teenagers say their parents know little or nothing about what they do on the Internet.
And if not careful, the online activity can lead to real life danger.
South Dakota's Internet Crimes Against Children unit knows that all too well.
For now, the unit is too busy reacting to problems with predators to do much about preventing them, something they're hoping to change.
Light says, "We're in the process of getting people together to do online stuff and be proactive."
That involves opening adults' eyes to what the Internet makes available.
The state has set up a website for people to access a variety of online safety resources. To see it, click here.
Man charged with trying to smother wife
Sara Israelsen
10 Aug 2006 12:00 am
Prosecutors filed charges earlier this week against Jarom Joel Braithwaite, 27, who placed a pillow over his wife's face in April after she refused to have sex with him.
The man had been watching pornography, then demanded that his wife take off her clothes so they could have sex, according to a police report filed in 4th District Court.
She said she told him no, because she was 8 1/2 months pregnant, after which he hit her in the arm and neck, according to the report.
The woman yelled for help and struggled to remove the pillow until she passed out. When she awoke, Braithwaite was gone and never mentioned the event again.
Two months later, the woman said her husband was watching pornography of women being tied up and raped. She left and took a shower, according to the report.
Sex Predator Arrested
09 Aug 2006 6:38 am
There is new information Wednesday morning on a Houston man police say came to Austin to meet a child for sex.
KXAN has learned that man was a former Galveston police officer.
Police say since last November, the 47-year-old has chatted online with someone he thought was a 14-year-old girl.
Instead, it was one of APD's child abuse investigators.
"If an individual like that meets with an underage child, you never know what will happen next, and you have to
assume the worst," said APD Detective Trent Watts. "In this case, we were unclear as to what this individual was
wanting to do exactly. We do know that during the online relationship, he was very explicit in his language towards
sexual content."
Capitol Hill rapist to return to Utah halfway house after serving prison time in Colorado
Reed Cowan
08 Aug 2006 7:59 pm
The man known as the Capitol Hill rapist will soon be back in Utah after a lengthy prison term in Colorado.
Bob Lee Boog Jr., who terrorized and raped women in the 1980s, will return to one of two halfway houses Tuesday night.
While the public focuses on Boogs release from prison to a halfway house, people who work to help victims of rape say our focus should be on those the perpetrator hurt.
Heather Stringfellow has worked for fifteen years for Utah's Rape Recovery Center and has been its director for the last two. She says, "We should remember there are sex offenders all around us. Not only on the sex offender registry, but also those who have not yet been caught."
Cab Driver Charged In Sexual Assault Of Passenger
08 Aug 2006 6:23 pm
Police arrested a cab driver on charges that he sexually assaulted a passenger.
The alleged incident happened on Sunday after sources said a 23-year-old woman decided to take a cab home instead of drive.
[The driver] has nine prior convictions, including felony car theft and drugs charges. He also has misdemeanor convictions for prostitution, harassment and driving under the influence.
Now he is charged with first-degree sexual assault -- a crime police believe happened in his cab.
Serial killer suspect accused of killing Minnesota native arrested in California
08 Aug 2006 9:26 am
A four-day manhunt for a convicted rapist wanted for two killings ended when two newspaper employees tackled him as he tried to carjack a woman, authorities said.
John Wayne Thomson, 46, was arrested Monday in Victorville, 68 miles east of Los Angeles, and was scheduled to be arraigned Tuesday.
Authorities accused Thomson of killing Charles Ray Hedlund, 55, of Lucerne Valley, Calif., whose body was found Saturday off Interstate 15. Hedlund is originally from Minnesota.
Authorities said Thomson has an extensive criminal record that includes three felony rape convictions. He has spent most of his life in prison and psychiatric hospitals, officials said.
US businesses challenge Illinois sanctions on Sudan
Reuters
08 Aug 2006 8:25 am
A leading U.S. business group filed a lawsuit in federal court on Monday aimed at striking down sanctions the state of Illinois has imposed on Sudan in response to ongoing violence in Darfur.
The National Foreign Trade Council includes major multinational corporations such as Boeing Co., Caterpillar Inc., Chevron Corp., Exxon Mobil Corp., Microsoft Corp., Ford Motor Co., General Motors Corp. and DaimlerChrysler AG.
Its case targets what the group says is a growing trend among states and local governments passing their own sanctions laws to put additional pressure to change their behavior on foreign governments such as Sudan.
Tens of thousands of people have been killed and 2.5 million forced from their homes during a three-year campaign of rape, killing and looting in Sudan's remote, arid Darfur region, creating one of the world's worst humanitarian crises.
Former President Bill Clinton banned U.S. trade and investment with Sudan in 1997 and Congress codified those sanctions in 2002 as part of the "Sudan Peace Act."
The Illinois law, which went into effect in January, bars state pension funds from investing in companies and financial institutions whose depositors, borrowers or other business associates have any dealings in Sudan.
Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who signed the Illinois measure into law in June 2005, stands by that decision, a spokeswoman said.
R.I.'s legal system set sex offender free for 19 months
CYNTHIA NEEDHAM
08 Aug 2006 1:00 am
On July 20, the Woonsocket police went looking for two young boys, 9 and 11, who had been reported missing hours earlier; they found the children riding bicycles on a city street with Cory Pero, the subject of the high-profile child pornography case of two years earlier.
He was arrested and sent to the ACI, but why was he on the streets?
As it turns out, the state failed to take the pornography case to a grand jury within the legally prescribed time so, on Dec. 10, 2004, the charges were dismissed; Pero was released from prison the same day.
What no one realized when Pero was arrested in 2003 or, again in 2004, was that he was supposed to be registered with the local police as a sex offender. As a juvenile, he had been found guilty in Family Court of commiting a sex crime in Providence.
U.S. Soldier Reportedly Described Rape Scene
Joshua Partlow
08 Aug 2006 12:00 am
A U.S. soldier charged with the rape and murder of a teenage Iraqi girl and the deaths of three of her relatives described to army investigators how he and his comrades hatched the plot during a morning of drinking whiskey, playing cards and hitting golf balls, an Army investigator testified Monday.
Spec. James P. Barker, 23, made the graphic admission in an interview and sworn statement, Special Agent Benjamin Bierce said at a hearing in Baghdad to determine whether the soldiers should face a military trial.
On March 12, Barker and three other soldiers donned black masks and entered the girl's home in Mahmudiyah, south of Baghdad, Bierce said. The home was a few hundred yards from where the soldiers were manning a vehicle checkpoint.
Three of them -- Barker, former private Steven D. Green and Sgt. Paul E. Cortez -- took turns sexually assaulting the girl in the living room before Green shot her several times with an AK-47 assault rifle, said Bierce, citing Barker's June 30 statement. Then Barker poured lamp kerosene on her and someone set her on fire, Bierce said.
Barker, in his statement, said he was in the living room with the girl when he heard gunshots in the bedroom where the soldiers had corralled her mother, father and younger sister. Then, according to Bierce's testimony, Green came into the living room looking agitated and said words to the effect of: "They're all dead. I just killed them."
After the killings, the soldiers went back to their checkpoint, where Barker grilled chicken wings, Bierce testified.
Doctor on Sex Offender Registry
08 Aug 2006 12:00 am
A central Iowa Doctor will now have to register as a sex offender. Warren county prosectors struck a plea deal with Dr. Dan miller. Miller was charged with sexual exploitation by a counselor after he allegedly had relationships with at least three patients while serving as a physician at a Mercy Clinic in Indianola.
Court records show on at least one occasion Miller would send inappropriate Emails, send love letters, even take trips with a female patient. The Board of Medical Examiners temporiarly suspended Miller for the same charges last year.
Woman copes with daughters' tragedies
TOM ALEX
08 Aug 2006 12:00 am
How much heartache can Sandra Moreland endure? That's what people might ask.
Moreland lost a daughter to a homicide over the weekend in Des Moines. Another daughter went missing four years ago, and a third daughter is in jail.
"At least I will have some closure with Georgina," Moreland said of her slain daughter, Georgina Kimble. "I know where she is. I wish I could say the same for Missy."
Kimble, 37, was stabbed to death in a basement apartment at Capitol Heights Apartments, in Des Moines. Early Sunday morning, Keith Parker, 48, a convicted sex offender, walked into the Polk County Jail and told employees that he had killed someone at his apartment. Parker was charged with first-degree murder.
The case was all but closed. But the pain at the Moreland house was just beginning.
Convicted Clinton rapist given life without parole
Associated Press
08 Aug 2006 12:00 am
An East Tennessee man who rejected a plea deal that would have brought him six years in a rape case now faces life without parole.
A jury in Clinton found Ralph Byrd Cooper, Jr. guilty in June of the rape of a 19-year-old woman. The judge said Monday he had no choice but to invoke the state "three strikes law."
That was because of Cooper's conviction a decade ago on three sodomy convictions involving an eight-year-old girl.
Mo. Landlord, 85, Accused of Harassment
SAM HANANEL
08 Aug 2006 12:00 am
The Justice Department on Tuesday sued a northwest Missouri landlord Tuesday alleging he sexually harassed female tenants and threatened them with eviction if they refused his advances.
"Housing is a fundamental need and no woman should be victimized while trying to obtain shelter for herself and her family," said Wan J. Kim, assistant attorney general for the Justice Department's civil rights division.
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Kansas City, alleges Calvert violated the federal Fair Housing Act, which prohibits sexual discrimination in housing. Some of Calvert's tenants receive Section 8 federal rental assistance from the Richmond Housing Authority.
The government is seeking damages to compensate the victims, plus civil penalties and a court order barring further discrimination.
Four child sex abuse cases hit local court
Jesse Fruhwirth
08 Aug 2006 12:00 am
Several unrelated but dreadful charges of sex crimes against children are making their way through the court system in Tooele. Second only to drug charges, sex crimes against children account for a large share of first-degree felonies on the court calendar.
Utah law defines rape of a child as sexual intercourse with an individual younger than 14 years old.
Sex abuse of a child is defined as any "indecent liberties with a child" under the age of 14 that do not amount to rape of a child & which implies sexual intercourse occurred & or sodomy on a child. Sex abuse of a child is a second-degree felony, but any of 10 aggravating factors can increase the crime to a first-degree felony.
Those aggravating factors include being a person in a "position of special trust" to the child, being a stranger to the child, causing bodily injury or severe psychological injury, or using a weapon or pornography during the abuse.
Sodomy on a child, under Utah law, is defined as "a sexual act ... involving the genitals or anus of the actor or the child and the mouth or anus of either person."
